| May. 2nd, 2008 @ 03:07 pm May Day's Not For Lovers |
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Readers,
Yesterday was May Day, and we at the Size Matters Editorial Staff have noticed elsewhere on the blogosphere that many are calling for May Day to be rebranded as Victims Of Communism Day. We agree that this would be a good idea.
It has been said that a man who is not a socialist when he is 25 does not have a heart, but a man who is still a socialist when he is thirty does not have a brain. One of the things that the brainless man must ignore is history. It is widely calculated that communist governments, during the Cold War, killed 100 million of their own citizens. Stalin alone, in the gulags, killed 40 million. Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge killed 2 million out of a 7 million population, in only 3 years.
The modern socialist will protest, No, that was communism. I'm a socialist. "Socialism" in this sense, is a vague idea, whereby the government has complete power to redistribute wealth, but, unlike it always has in realty, this government, due it's utter saintliness apparently, chooses not to take dictatorial political control of its people. (It's interesting to note that in America, before the horrors of Communism were known, this Communism versus Socialism distinction was not made.)
The reason why "socialism" as defined above is impossible should not be hard to see. Perhaps the most important distinction to make in political philosophy is the one between negative rights and positive rights. Negative rights are the "freedom from". Positive rights are the "freedom to". Another way to say the same thing is that negative rights are "Equality of opportunity" whereas positive rights are "Equality of result". Not only are these things different, but, as the bloody history of communism/socialism shows, they are mutually exclusive.
For the people to have freedom of opportunity, the government need only provide the people equally with "freedoms from", from murder, from theft, etc. To do this, as limited a government as possible is desirable. To give people equality of outcome, "freedoms to", to equal wealth, power, privilege, etc., requires that the government be given the power to redistribute the wealth. Thus, no one is to have "freedom from" government theft, so that others can have "from to" the fruits of that theft. Furthermore, the only way for a government to be able to decide what is produced and how much is consumed is to give them absolute power over society.
A government with this much power is many times more dangerous to overall welfare than the natural disparities that arise from a fair competition among people with unequal amounts of talent. In fact, in a free market a transaction will not occur unless it benefits both parties. So, despite whatever relative disparities, in a free market overall welfare will always be rising. But socialism, since it requires an all-powerful government, will always result in brutal dictatorship. Looking at the history of the 20th century, we find that this is exactly what has always happened. Not only were tens of millions killed by the government directly, but tens of millions more were killed in the worst famines the world has known, due to the inability of central planning to work economically.
We at the Size Matters Editorial Staff were all the proverbial socialists-when-we-were-25. But now, as we approach 30, we've come to understand the truth, that though the girl with the hairy armpits at the Free Mumia rally is appealing, the social structure that she probably supports has been shown repeatedly by history to lead irretrievably to mass death.
Happy May Day.
--The Size Matters Editorial Staff |
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